How the Internet Broke the Self

Hall of Mirrors: Digital Personae and the Fractured Self (2/3)

Most of you reading this will happily admit that you’re somewhat dependent on the internet. You are tied to the matrix through the techno-umbilical cords of your devices. An uncanny truth about this matrix is that the relationship isn't unidirectional—it's not just feeding you. You've spawned digital doppelgangers across its expanse. Look into your phone's black mirror and count the faces staring back. There's your LinkedIn avatar, smooth as shoeshine and adorned by professional achievements. Your Instagram reflection, bathed in the warm evening light of the curated peaks of your life. And many more faces, with varying degrees of resolution. One for each network you engage with. Each one is you, and none of them are you.

The internet is a hall of mirrors, multiplying and flattening.

Our Faustian bargain: as digital existence transcends physical constraints, we fragment into flatter, compartmentalised shadows of ourselves.

In the first article of this series, we explored how the self is natively multiplayer, a multiplicity. In this piece, we examine what happens when the self collides with the internet.

The Message is Multiplying

“The medium is the message” - Marshall McLuhan

To understand this collision, we first need to grasp how each medium fundamentally transforms the messages it carries. McLuhan’s bumper sticker “The medium is the message” summarises this effect: The how of communication overwhelms the what. The same stone thrown into a pond, a river, or the ocean will ripple, splash, or disappear in the waves. The medium transforms its impact completely.

According to McLuhan, the medium of the printing press created a shift towards individualism and rationality, while the medium of television encouraged passive, isolated viewing while creating a sense of global interconnectedness. What is the message of the internet? Beyond its surface content, what deeper patterns are being encoded by cat videos, memes, and cookie-consent pop-ups?

A few key characteristics of the internet:

• While audio-visual, short-form media tends to dominate, we find all types of previous media on the internet: books, radio, and television all reincarnate in cyberspace.

• The internet supports instantaneous communication, resulting in an increased speed of interaction. The interactivity also leads to more repetition, remixing and recombination: like an infinite game of “telephone”, messages morph and propagate through the interwebs. Think of cross-posting, memes, and copypasta.

• The internet is increasingly made up of different platforms, creating a multiplicity of different online environments.

• Communication on most platforms is many-to-many and global. This characteristic erases the notion of geographic distance—the internet is flat.

These characteristics not only change the message, but fundamentally transform both sender and receiver. The medium of the internet doesn't just carry our identities—it actively reshapes them. This transformation manifests most visibly in “profilicity”—a new paradigm of identity construction unique to digital spaces."

Profilicity

Interactivity and multilateral communication give rise to the most profound characteristic of the Internet: the sense of being witnessed by others. The public nature of communication online adds an (imagined) audience to any interaction.

Second-order observation reigns supreme online.

The consideration of how others judge our posts and interactions is always present, and we carefully curate our profiles accordingly. Hans-Georg Moeller describes this as “profilicity”, a new paradigm of identity after sincerity (fixed social roles) and authenticity (individual expression).

Profilicity explains the omnipresent swarm of smartphones that pop up at any happening (compare the photos of the same performance at Disneyland from 2010 and 2017 that Moeller presented). It explains why today’s tourists seem to care about sights only insofar as they provide a background for their selfies. In many ways, our online personae have become primary. Why enjoy the view from a mountaintop, an experience that will wane just moments later, if you can snap a selfie and immortalize it on your profile? “Picture or it didn’t happen”. Seemingly escaping the confines of time and space, the proud serenity on your sweaty grimace can be admired days later by your followers on the other side of the world. “I was here, I climbed this mountain,” says the selfie. Three likes on Instagram validate that self-revelation.

Platform Physics

Profilicity expresses itself differently across the internet's varied terrain. Each platform creates its own playing field, its own rules of physics. The internet is not just a single new medium, but a multiplicity of media, one for each platform. Social media networks, digital commerce, or educational environments are all separated from one another. Many of these platforms inhibit the flow of information in both directions: Content on Facebook is not accessible to search engines, Twitter down-regulates posts that link to other sites. Each platform is its own fiefdom.

Source: Critical Atlas of Internet

McLuhan’s insight doesn’t just apply to the internet as a whole, but to each platform. The architecture and affordances of the platform— its post formats, its reward mechanisms, its social norms—isn't just a container for our expression. It's a mold that shapes our very thoughts, feelings, and identity.

Consider a statement like "I disagree with the current consensus on AI risk." On LinkedIn, this becomes a carefully worded thought leadership piece, hedged with professional courtesy and backed by citations. On Twitter, it morphs into a pointed challenge: maximum engagement with minimal character count. On 4Chan, it might spawn a schizoid fury of memes and slurs. The message transforms because each platform's architecture shapes not just how we communicate but who we become within its borders:

On LinkedIn, professional achievement has a pull like gravity. Every piece of information must be alchemized into a lesson about leadership or resilience. "What dishwashing taught me about project management." LinkedIn enforces this transformation not through rules but through the subtle violence of social expectations and career consequences, producing a corporate drone of a persona.

Twitter's unilateral following and viral mechanics spawn a persona optimized for wit, conflict, and engagement. Every thought must be weaponized, compressed into a dense pellet of controversy or outrage capable of triggering a cascade of engagement. Twitter personae burn bright and hot but quickly exhaust their fuel.

4Chan's anonymity and lack of persistent identity create a collective consciousness unbound by individual reputation. Users become like droplets in the thunderstorm of an unhinged hive-mind, producing behavior that would be unthinkable on other platforms.

The real-world profile and professional social graph explain why LinkedIn is full of humblebrags and water-cooler trivialities. The virality afforded by Twitter and its constraints around character limits explain why it’s like an infinite cocktail party where everyone is shouting scissor statements. Finally, it seems obvious that the anonymity and lack of persistent identity on 4Chan would produce an alien hive-mind with an obsession with breaking social conventions.

These platform-specific manifestations of self point to a deeper pattern: our identities aren't merely migrating online—they're undergoing a fractal fragmentation as they enter the digital.

Fractal Fragmentation

As a result of the different platform physics, we find ourselves with a different persona, a different sense of self across platforms. The different elements of the assemblage of the self (see the previous piece) re-arrange themselves across media, merging with the persona most in line with those patterns. Traits, emotional tendencies, and communication styles find expression in different personae. For instance, a proud and driven part will find itself most happy on LinkedIn while a snarky or angry part finds their home on Twitter or even 4Chan (if it’s really angry).

The self is fractured along the fault lines between online platforms.

This fragmentation doesn’t just happen on a platform level but even within platforms based on different feedback loops. The algorithms surface the content that you will engage with. Your filter bubble and mine are different. This part of Twitter is not your part of Twitter. Feedback loops from algorithmic curation and social validation push our digital personae towards more extreme versions of themselves, polarising and widening the gaps between them. The results are not just filter bubbles but reality tunnels—personalized ontologies that can spiral individuals toward ideological extremes with frightening efficiency. Many poor souls have been radicalized by the YouTube algorithm.

However, the most profound rupture happens at an even deeper level—in the dimensions of the experiential self. These dimensions normally exist in constant feedback, creating the rich texture of human experience, but the internet has changed this ancient dance. Of our five dimensions (explored previously), only the social, narrative, and to some degree the agentic dimension have migrated online. The perspectival and bodily dimensions, our immediate experience and physical presence, remain stubbornly analog.

Our digital personae operate like dimensional reduction algorithms.

Mapping the rich topology of embodied existence onto flat surfaces. Like a photograph of a tree, they capture detail but lose the essential qualities that emerge from physical presence—the texture of bark beneath fingers, the sound of leaves rustling, the perspective shift as you circle its trunk.

The remaining narrative and social dimensions of the self are supercharged by profilicity: Our digital personae multiply and evolve at incredible speeds. Because they are cut off from the grounding influence of physical experience, this creates a dangerous imbalance. The feedback loops between dimensions that normally create a balanced self are disrupted. We're left with a kaleidoscope of projected images, detailed and data-rich, but disembodied and fundamentally flat.

This is the true meaning of "the medium is the message" in the digital age. The explosion of platforms hasn't just changed how we communicate, it has changed who we are. We've gained unprecedented freedom to multiply our identities, but lost something fundamental in the process. Our selves have become more diverse, but less dimensional, more flexible but less grounded. We're everywhere and nowhere, anyone and no one.

Power and Evolution in the Digital

This dimensional flattening isn't merely a psychological curiosity—it represents a fundamental shift in how power operates and how consciousness itself might be evolving online. We've moved beyond Foucault's disciplinary society, where institutions shaped individuals through the threat of bodily violence. Following Deleuze's prophetic vision, we've become "dividuals", endlessly divisible selves, each fragment controlled by the online platforms it inhabits.

The dividual doesn't resist this fragmentation but thrives within it. Unlike the disciplined subject who struggles against institutional power, the dividual flows between platforms, adopting and shedding identities with increasing fluidity. Control no longer operates through confinement but through modulation: regulating access, visibility, and connectivity.

This modulation happens through the specific ways platforms regulate information: How we connect (bilateral "friends" vs. unilateral "following"), what we know about each other (IRL identities vs. pseudonyms), how messages propagate, and countless other architectural decisions. Shadowbanning is the new cancellation. The most effective form of control isn't the deleted post but the algorithm that ensures it was never seen in the first place.

What we're witnessing isn't merely technological change but an evolutionary adaptation. The unified self—always partly a fiction—has now been algorithmically disassembled. We've entered the age of the digital dividual: fragmented, distributed, and increasingly comfortable existing across incompatible planes of being.

In the final piece of this series, we'll explore the economy of digital dividuals, how identity fragments become a new form of currency—something to be traded, weaponized, and desired. The self is no longer subject but object.